I had plans for a video at CEC, in the end with so much going on and having brought a big still camera I ended up not doing an video.

I'll leave you with this small sample of one morning at CEC (audio required):

By the time we got to the hotel we had been up for ~25 hours. The flight was fine, a little bit worried at first when I went to check the status and saw canceled at 04:00 (it had been pushed back 7 minutes). Once we landed our guide was right past customs which was fortunate given the high volume of passengers and people waiting for them.

After about an hour in a van going to the hotel we checked in (now in a suite, not what we were expecting, we seem to have gotten a bump to the executive levels). @cdash took a bath to clear her sinuses and the rest of us went for a walk in the park across the street so we wouldn't fall asleep before we meant to. We took some pictures in the park, got turned around and made it back to the hotel for dinner.

On the way out the door for our tours of

• Yu Yuan Garden
• The Bund
• Shanghai Museum
• Shanghai Urban Exhibition Center

Firefly* on Paradise Tapas Kitchen & Bar

ThinGuy's wife, Bhlackey, artp

louspringer, the guys who's names I can't remember

louspringer and thinguy

another name I can't remember and thinguy

(Update: Fixed louspringers name on the second pic. no idea how I missed that I typed lousmith the first time, sorry Lou)

The gallery

Not much to say about our meeting. 

The party was interesting, the space was nearly big enough but the ability to move was constrained by the shape of the spaces.

A party in three parts:

The pool: Big hit, weather was really nice. Women dancing on platforms on the pool, RC boats running around the pool, piles of CEC attendees standing around the pool, live band. Long lines.

The Band:

Inside, downstairs: Eh, dark, loud. Everyone was packing the pool side so lines inside (particularly upstairs) were non-existent when I was there. Easy access to taquitos wasn't especially engaging. We also had a briefly interesting but overall uninspiring Kill Bill interpretive dance also some disappointing fire play (I am spoiled).

Little Buddha: Apparently there was sushi, I got a couple of pieces from the on the run guy, he would barely slow down to let you get anything. Couldn't find any of the carry out type boxes with food in them, no idea what they were. Dessert was tasty but I am not sure how the baklava relates to the sushi theme. Really tasty whipped peanut butter tart things (if you like peanut butter). I took one picture it wasn't so good.

The final I am sometimes a negative person verdict: music was to loud (always is) forgot my earplugs, party wasn't bad but it was somewhat hard to navigate. Got some good pictures of the dancing (sure to be a hit based on the long term ogling around the pool).

After the party we went back to the hotel had a drink and cigar at Napoleon's then on to an "outdoor" cafe/stage at paris.

I forgot the name of the group

Gallery of all the pictures.

Breakfast, made of disturbingly uniform and low flavor egg:

Tuesday was "Green"

The sound mixer, this is a geeky conference after all:

Drummers warm up the crowd while slides discuss the eco-cost of current data-centers and technology.

Jonathan's talk about developers and how Netapp's case against us is great publicity and told their customers

that we have a compelling product that threatens them.

Solaris the Momentum is Undeniable:

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

Some pictures from during the day.

The Blackbox trailer

SPARC Enterprise M5000

Video Surveillance

Un-Conference Speed Geeking:

James Baty

Dtrace provider for /bin/sh

Hal Stern

Me

After the un-conference was officially over some of us sat around with James Baty for another 30-45min. After Jim left @timkennedy, @edsai, James Dean and I sat around talking for another 30 min. Once they were done breaking down the room Tim, Ed and I were in the way so we went to the CEC Pavilion and continued talking before heading off to bed.

Again I say this is how a conference is supposed to be, at Moscone they kick us out at 9 and disperse to bars or hotels or whatever. No way this type of thing happens at last years CEC.

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

The T2 launch was interesting, having technical staff on hand to ask technical questions was fun (as was the for those of you who are wondering why the questions are are getting seem so technical)

Is this Web 2.0?

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

Bob Sneed

Bob is a fount of knowledge, I highly recommend any course/session/conversation with him. Unfortunately we are trying to pack what could be days of discussion into a tiny fraction of the time.

Bob was wondering if anyone had an LG phone charger, his is dead.

Why capacity: reduce capacity escalations, raise awareness

What is capacity: Submarine 100% underwater vs. at crush depth (the physical metaphor is what people understand) CPU 100% vs. unacceptable application performance.

Look for the Business problem not some easily observed numbers from the system (CPU, IOPS)

Capacity done wrong: over-provisioning

• HW is cheap, why not buy more (power, cooling)
• good if you sell computers
• better safe than sorry (problems pointed at insufficient HW(why didn't you buy more, it is cheap)

Bad QoS management in Small Iron == Bad QoS management on Big Iron

• Over provisioning reduces the incentive to "do it right"
• eco-reckless
• Inefficiencies on small hardware are MORE inefficient on big hardware, only you can waste more before it is a problem

Utilization has no "quality" dimension it is a measurement of busy. Utilization does not reflect the performance of useful work.

See Adrian's blog or paper (search on) "utilization is a virtually useless metric"

Without Business Metrics all you have are a bunch of numbers.

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

During lunch Radia wandered b our table. I was wearing my xkcd sudo shirt yesterday and we talked briefly. Jim stopped her to say hello and thank her again for the session last night. Jim and Radia started talking about one of the stories from last night (determine the problem before solving it).

We started talking about network protocols and families and children and, and and. Then we got kicked out of the lunch room so we set up shot in the hallway for the next 1.5 hours and talked more about network protocols, security deployments and experience.

It was cool, THIS is what large face to face conferences are about. Serendipitous meetings and conversations that we have yet to mimic/facilitate/experience in virtual worlds.

Jim and Radia, identification will be left up to the reader

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

Bob Sneed, of course it was absolutely as far as it could be from Capacity and immediately after.

Upgrade to S10U4 now :) (this could almost be the whole message)

Performance issues are: perceived + industry + real (all three must be addressed)

See b.s.c. timc "event driven utilization"

Application performance on Solaris 10 is NOT always better BUT can almost always be made to work better under S10 than with previous versions of Solaris.

2 presentations of 60 - 90 minutes done via speed reading

Upgrade to S10U4

Upgrade to S10U4

Upgrade to S10U4

Upgrade to S10U4

Upgrade to S10U4

Upgrade to S10U4

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

IdM and RBAC are the next "new thing" Manage roles not users.

Why is it a perfect storm. SOX, Periodic Access Review. larger numbers of users, LDAP has good penetration. RBAC clarification in the industry from NIST.

NIST RBAC

1. Level 1, flat
2. Level 2 hierarchial
   1. Inherited
   2. Activated
3. Level 3, constrained
   
   1. must enforce separation of duties at the role level
   2. static and dynamic (check at session creation and deny)
4. Level 4, symetrical with permission review
   
   1. SOD inspection of permissions granted by roles in addition to role conflicts
   2. performance must be roughly equiv

Blowing my own horn!

Sunday took and passed the Solaris Certified Network Administrator exam!

Monday took and passed the Solaris Certified Security Administrator exam!

(This one I was really worried about but passed with a 79.7 (or so) score)

I would go take more tests but I already have the S10 admin and I have serious doubts that I could do anything with the Java or Cluster exams.

It is currently my understanding that only two people have taken the Security exam so aside from me, Glenn Brunette (of Glenn Brunette's Security Blog) who wrote the exam.

(Glenn is the front most guy)

The whole gallery, being updated as frequently as possible.

UPDATE:

Name: Shawn Ferry
Name of candidates company (if provided): Sun Microsystems
Student ID:
Test Title: Sun Certified Network Administrator for Solaris 10 OS
Start time: 10/7/2007 5:01:07 PM (GMT-7:00) (cst)
End time: 10/7/2007 5:48:42 PM (GMT-7:00) (cst)
Passing Score: 62%
Your Score: Pass - 73.44% (47 earned out of 64 possible)

Congratulations! You passed the exam.

This score is very close to what I got on the practice exams (74% and 75%) Not a surprise here,

IPv6 is still something that I deal with infrequently. If you are looking to take

this exam you would benefit from being familiar with IPv6. Also pntadm and dhtadm it helps if your method of

doing DHCP doen't commonly include "oops, wanted the other one."

Name: Shawn Ferry
Name of candidates company (if provided): Sun Microsystems
Student ID:
Test Title: Sun Certified Security Administrator for the Solaris 10 OS
Start time: 10/8/2007 5:27:46 PM (GMT-7:00) (cst)
End time: 10/8/2007 6:11:50 PM (GMT-7:00) (cst)
Passing Score: 52%
Your Score: Pass - 79.66% (47 earned out of 59 possible)

You passed the exam.

I did a bit better on the practice exam but I am fairly happy with this score.

The test was harder than I was expecting, priv.  management is good to know. Keeping straight

auth/user/prof whatever attr and what you need to do to add/modify privs was a bit dicey. I normally

find myself looking at the man pages or in the files to remind myself of exactly what I am doing when I am making

modifications. Testing is harder when you can't use man! Also important defaults values, security concepts, not surprisingly

just about everything in the goals statement for the testing/training.

Richard Elling

Performability = Ability to Perform

Simple: when up performance = 100, down = 0

This is not an accurate(realistic,real life) representation of system performance and availability for complex systems..

This is something that Sun Managed Operations has been dealing with for years. Say you have 100 identical web servers, if 10 are down what state are you in.

This is even harder in complex environments. All of managed ops PSEs should attend this presentation, it isn't something that we all deal with, but as trusted solution providers/advisers this is right up our alley. Everything is done in tradeoffs.